NOVANEWS
This is while Saudi Arabia reportedly plans to reduce the number of migrant workers to create jobs for unemployed Saudi nationals.
The following is an approximate transcript of the interview.
Press TV: What is the condition of migrants in Saudi Arabia? How are they treated by the government there?
Tillawi: It’s not just about how they are treated by the government, it’s how they are treated by the culture that has been evolved in the last 60 or 70 years since the Kingdom started having migrant workers.
Unfortunately in Saudi Arabia and many of other [Persian] Gulf countries, migrant workers are treated like slaves and they are thought of as slaves, looked down upon as if they were not human.
And unfortunately many of them have to endure that kind of treatment because that is the only way they can actually feed their families back home wherever they come from – if they are from Indonesia or from wherever they might be from.
Most of them are from Southeast Asia and a lot of them are from other Arab countries. The treatment for people even from Arab countries is not great, but it is not as bad as the treatment for people from Southeast Asia.
It’s an unfortunate situation, it’s more than the government, it’s more of a culture that was actually evolved in the [Persian] Gulf area against and looking down at migrant workers.
Press TV: We know that migrant workers in Saudi Arabia experience extreme working conditions. Take that and add the fact that the kingdom wants to replace those migrant workers with its own nationals, Saudi nationals who are unemployed.
Will those Saudis be able to experience and endure and tolerate the very same conditions that the migrants experience – those extreme hard working conditions?
Tillawi: Of course, every country has the right to come up with their own laws to reduce their unemployment, but you must understand that the Saudi nationals, they are not going to, 1) they are not going to be treated like the migrant workers; and 2) they are not going to replace them with these jobs.
You are never going to see a Saudi working in a house as a server or as a house boy. You’re not going to find them working on the streets on construction jobs and cleaning jobs and sanitation. The ones that are going to be replaced are basically those in administration jobs.
The problem with the treatment is that those who are facing this horrible treatment are not those who are working in administrative jobs or professional jobs like engineers or doctors etc, etc, but are … the average workers e.g. the sanitation workers, the factory workers, the construction workers. These are the people who have the worst [condition] and these are not the jobs that Saudi nationals will even accept.
